Landscapes of “New Western (Ir)religiosity”: Mutual Plausibility of the Theistic and Atheistic Options as an Unexpected Effect of Post-Secular Society

This chapter presents a series of critical considerations about religious belief and unbelief, starting from a general “anatheistic” assumption (Kearney 2011), and thus accepting the challenge of rethinking the question of God “after God.” In this scenario the spirituality, theism and atheism categories are recaptured and redefined as attitudes deriving their plausibility from the same anatheistic framework, thus managing to legitimate one another without necessarily being contradictory. The privatisation and individualisation of the religious, apparently the central trait of “post-secular” religiosity, can also be described in terms of a religious rebirth in accordance with new interpretations of the sacred which may appear plausible in the secular age while, at the same time, keeping alive the hypothesis that they are also the most emblematic expression of contemporary irreligiosity. On the theoretical level, the concepts of “Western Irreligiosity” and the “Age of Secularisation,” both coined by the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, occupy a central role. On the empirical level, the chapter presents a typology of attitudes emerging from a recent empirical qualitative research investigating (ir)religiosity among Italian young people.